ELVis lives!

[martin]

Greetings!

Still struggling a bit coming to grips with the PSX layout system?
Confused by 9packs, sub-frames, dividers, and so on?

Here comes ELVis to give you a hand.

ELVis, the Easy Layout Visualizer for PSX, is a little tool that shows your layouts in the context of the whole PSX cockpit, so that you will get a better overview of what is where.
(Note, however, that it is a "mere" display utility, not an editor: You cannot use it to create or modify layouts.)

The tool is simple enough to use, but to understand it properly, please do read the documentation first; this will also give you the download link.
(The document is also included in the download package, for offline reading.)

If you still have any problems or questions, read the documentation!  :mrgreen:

Have fun!

Cheers,
Martin



Click on the image to jump to the documentation which has a larger picture.

[Hessel Oosten]

He strikes again !

Really handy.
Thank you very much !

Hessel

[Russell Too]

Aha!
A picture is worth 100 posts.
All is now clear,
many thanks Martin.
Kind regards Russell

[Ray_CYYZ]

Love it!

If you want to get cute, you can use the Elvis_C_final to create an icon for windows through http://www.convertico.com/

[Phil Bunch]

My PSX shipment arrives Monday and this will be very helpful.

Thanks for providing such a useful utility!  

I'm sure the PSX community will be every bit as good as and (in many unique ways) even better than the old PS1 community.  Of course, much of the old PS1 community is alive and well and active with PSX.

[744kid]

Thanks, Martin. A simple, yet useful tool. Thanks for sharing with everyone.

[MalcolmT]

Thank you for this very useful utility Martin.
 

[martin]

Thanks, guys, I'm glad you like it!

Cheers,
Martin

[Hessel Oosten]

Martin,

If I understood it well, output in razor-sharp format (png) , just like the razor sharp PSX itself, could possibly  be added ?

If possible: Yes please.

Hartelijke groeten,

Hessel

[falconeye]

Thank you! Not yet tested, but the picture looks promising

Cheers

[Phil Bunch]

Martin,

If I understood it well, output in razor-sharp format (png) , just like the razor sharp PSX itself, could possibly  be added ?

If possible: Yes please.

Hartelijke groeten,

Hessel

I agree - thanks for considering our requests.

[martin]

output in razor-sharp format (png)

It would not be added to but rather replace the JPEG format.

I'll look into it. But please be patient; it may take a while, because I recently lost my main development computer, and have to set up everything again from backups etc.

In the meantime and as a work-around, you can of course always take your own screenshots and save them in a higher-quality format.

Cheers,
Martin

[brian747]

Thank you, Martin!

It's a great tool for examining the example layouts, prior to setting up one's own.    

Cheers,

Brian

[martin]

Greetings!

Further to the request above about having ELVis take screenshots in PNG (as opposed to the current JPEG) format.

As promised, I have looked into it, but before proceeding would like to ask for more feedback.

So far I have only used the default settings for PNG production; it is probably possible to fiddle with them some more. However, it is not quite clear to me what the target would be.
Hence my question:

What improvement is it precisely that you are looking for with PNG over JPEG?

To me, the difference in quality between those screenshot formats seems rather marginal. (And the generated PNG file in my test is precisely twice as large as the corresponding JPEG file: 656 kB vs. 228 kB).

I know what to look for, and I do see some improvement with PNG, but it's really very slight. So I would like your views.

It will all depend much on what monitor, resolution, graphics cards, etc. you are using (in my case it's a modest 1280x1024); and Macs (with or without Retina) will very probably also make a difference, compared to Win boxes.

So, what exactly needs to be better in the PNGs?
(So that I can find out which parameters, if available, should be fine-tuned).

Cheers,
Martin

[Ray_CYYZ]

PNG is a no detail loss compression format. JPEG is not and is limited to 256 colors. That is why you notice the size difference. Pictures are fine in JPG, but work with fine lines and text really needs to be done in PNG format.

Does not matter to me personally as I am more interested in you thinking about adding edit & save functions!  :mrgreen:

[Hessel Oosten]

Hi Martin

My wish for   "as sharp as it can be....", was using (partial) outputs as desktop images.
But I see (as you wrote) that taking screenshots is in that case a better (sharper) option.
So if it takes extra power from you, don't do it for me.

Hessel

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

Martin, see it this way: PNG (and the older GIF) are better suited to exact pixel replications of the original input, while JPEG fuzzes around it and works better for photos and other material that is originally not generated pixel by pixel but the result of a capture from a non-pixelated world.

If you take a simple one-pixel line on a white background, PNG will reproduce exactly that, while JPEG will produce an approximation of a line on a white background. This becomes very apparent if you have sharp line drawings or even letters on white background.

At the same time, pixelated line drawings compress (losslessly) very well, so PNG may actually come out better compressed (less bytes) than JPEG.

You can set the JPEG compressor to basically not compress, which will result in much better quality. Try higher compression levels on JPEG and PNG to clearly see the exaggerated difference.


Hoppie

[martin]

Thanks for the comments.

Hoppie, yes I know* (I just wasn't telling, so as to no pre-influence people in reporting what they see ).

My question was rather about this specific case, where in practice the quality difference between those formats seems rather negligible (although it is of course visible, esp. when zooming in).

And I was wondering if perhaps people on other systems / OSes / monitors see much larger problems with JPEG than those I see.

I'll have a further look what can be done (it's not yet quite clear what PNG options I can use at all).

But that

adding edit & save functions! :mrgreen:

...will never happen.  :shock:

Cheers,
Martin

* I've tried for years to get the idea out of peoples' heads that JPEG is the panacea wonder-cure snake-oil format for each and every kind of illustration...

[Ray_CYYZ]

adding edit & save functions! :mrgreen:

...will never happen.  :shock:

Cheers,
Martin

I seem to remember a guy named Hardy saying something similar once ...

[Phil Bunch]

Martin,

Thanks for the great add-on and for all your ongoing efforts.

One detail I am missing - with hard drive space so cheap and plentiful, why does roughly doubling the space used by these PNG files matter?  I don't personally worry much about file sizes until they become something like hundreds of megabytes or more, as long as they're not something that is being created in high volumes or something like every day.

Please forgive me if (as I fear) I've once again misunderstood something that is obvious to everyone else.